But the poets have said to us, “Do not abandon the world, for it abounds in pure and truly divine joys that will be lost if you do not harvest them!” The road that ought to be sweet for us to follow crosses now that of the Christians, now that of the Stoics. We may stop now at the Garden of Olives, now at the threshold of that small house without a door, without furnishings, where the master of Arrien used to live. Our road will lead us even more often through wild, solitary places, or to the pillow of some man who sleeps in the earth, or to the smiling dwelling of some humble friend, or again into the melodious shadow where the souls of Beethoven and Johann Sebastian Bach forever dwell. We shall not struggle with the mass of deluded man to possess the known, so long as the unknown remains without a master. We shall give up crude material possession in order to dream all the better of spiritual possession. No, we cannot any longer renounce our kingdom when it calls to us, when for us it sings, hosanna! And those of us who already have their place in the kingdom of heaven must not hesitate to demand their share of this world also; for the world has been given to all men so that each man, with the help of all the rest, may possess the whole of it. III THE POSSESSION OF OTHERS I In the exile of the war I have fifteen comrades, and we live side by side like seamen on the deck of a ship. Everything brings us together: work, sleep, play, food and danger. Even our quarrels reunite us, for, in order to quarrel well, you have to know your man: between strangers disputes have little savor. I never chose these men for my companions, as I once thought I had a right to do. They have been given to me like a handful of fruit of which some is juicy and some green. They have been taken at random, as if by a drag of that net which respects nothing, from the swarming species of man. Thanks, therefore, to the blind and divine world which has thrown the net into the flood! They are my treasure, my study, and my daily task. They are my purpose, my horizon, my torment, and my recompense. Although far from my own people, far from those with whom I have carried on my life, I could not feel myself destitute, abandoned; the world is not empty for me since I have these fifteen men to manage, this cherished problem to ponder, this soil to work over, this vintage for the winepress. I accept the gift, the restless opulence, the fifteen glances that open on fifteen different heavens where there shine neither the same seasons nor the same stars, those fifteen proud, vindictive souls whom I must win over and subdue like wild horses.